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The Table of Heraclea and the Lex Iulia Municipalis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Extract

For many years the controversy as to the nature of this mysterious document, though not entirely extinct, was rendered almost dormant by the general acceptance of the famous hypothesis of Savigny and Mommsen. It was, they suggested, the concluding portion of a comprehensive law, entitled the lex Iulia Municipalis, by which Caesar in 45 B.C. regulated municipal institutions, not only in all communities of Roman citizens within the Italian peninsula, but partly at least in Rome herself, as after all merely the foremost municipality of the empire. It is idle to deny that the hypothesis, so stated, rests upon a somewhat slender basis of established fact. Only two general municipal regulations are contained in the Table, one with certainty, the other with great probability, attributable to Caesar. It has to be assumed, therefore, that only an insignificant part of the whole law has been preserved. As for the reason suggested for including provisions about Rome in such a municipal law, Prof. Reid's dictum can hardly be gainsaid that never was so profound an idea presented in a more trivial form.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright ©E. G. Hardy 1914. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

page 65 note 1 The text of the Table has often been edited since it was found in 1732–1735 near Heraclea. It may be seen conveniently in Bruns, Fontes (ed. 7, 1909), p. 102, in Dessau, Inscr. Selectae (1902), no. 6085, and (with an English translation) in the author's Roman Laws and Charters, pp. 136, foll.

page 65 note 2 In his edition of the lex municipii Tarentini, Ephem. epigr. ix, pp. 5, 6Google Scholar (Ges. Schriften, i, 152, 153).

page 66 note 1 Objections to Savigny's view had been brought by Hackel, Festheft Bormann (in Wiener Studien, xxiv), 1902, p. 320, and others.

page 68 note 1 Suet. Caes. 42.

page 70 note 1 In the Revue des Études Anciennes, tome xiv, no. 1.

page 73 note 1 C.I.L. i, 1166, does not prove that footpaths in Aletrium were paved, but only that they were made.

page 73 note 2 Hitzig, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung, roman. Abteilung, xxvi, 433Google Scholar; brief account in Haverfield, Ancient Townplanning, pp. 53–55.

page 77 note 1 l. 69.

page 77 note 2 cap. xxi.

page 77 note 3 Suet. Caes. 76.

page 77 note 4 xliii, 48.

page 77 note 5 ll. 73 and 144.

page 79 note 1 Suet. Caes. II.

page 80 note 1 Caes. II.

page 81 note 1 The case in pro Roscio Amer. is not an instance. To show the blood and the weapon is not to bring in the head, a phrase which Legras himself admits must be taken literally.

page 81 note 2 Legras attempts to fortify his contention that the excluded class was a profession and not mere perpetrators of a particular atrocity, by pointing to its place in the list, where it is followed by professional cinaedi and lanistae and lenones. Curiously, however, he ignores the fact that it is immediately preceded by persons cashiered from the army and condemned by a public iudicium.

page 82 note 1 The fact that the discussion in the de Nat. Deor. is supposed to have taken place in 76 B.C. seems irrelevant, since there are no indications that Cicero was careful about the unities of time and place in such matters.

page 82 note 2 pro Caec. 27, 77.

page 82 note 3 de Nat. Deor. iii, 30, 74; de off. iii, 17, 70; Topic. 10, 42, and 17, 66.

page 82 note 4 D. 13, 6, 5, §§ 6, 10, 11.

page 83 note 1 ad Fam. vi, 18.

page 86 note 1 See above, p. 70.

page 86 note 2 As a matter of fact, they were actually opposed on the same point, as the words διὰ τοȗτο καί prove, though other complications were added.

page 87 note 1 This supplement of Mazochi seems absolutely certain, and is generally accepted, though the last edition of Bruns mentions it only in a footnote, Many far more doubtful supplements are inserted.

page 88 note 1 xvi, 13.

page 88 note 2 I was relieved, after writing the sentence in the text, to see Mommsen's estimate of this definition as “ein wahres Meisterstück historisch-juristischer Confusion und der Vermengung des alten und desneuen Sprachgebrauchs.”

page 88 note 3 pro Balb. vii, 21.

page 91 note l pro Balb. 21–22.

page 96 note 1 Jurist. Schriften, vol. i, p. 153.

page 96 note 2 iii, pp. 376, 377 (Engl. trans.).

page 97 note 1 Cic. in Verr. ii, 49, 122.

page 99 note 1 C.I.L. xii, 5371.

page 102 note 1 App. 1, 85.

page 102 note 2 Dess. 870.

page 102 note 3 Val. Max. 9, 3, and Plut. Sull. 37.

page 102 note 4 Bruns, p. 374.

page 103 note 1 Cic. ad Att. 5, 2, 3.

page 104 note 1 pro Cluent. 8, 25. I am indebted to Mr. Strachan-Davidson, both for the reference to pro Cluent. and for the first suggestion that Cinna must have done something for municipal organisation.

page 104 note 2 C.I.L. x, 113 and 114.

page 105 note 1 Bruns, p. 95.

page 105 note 2 The five names attached to this law seem to present a problem even more insoluble than that of the Table of Heraclea itself. I do not attempt to solve it, but it is curious that a Roscius and a Peducaeus were praetors in 49, and that the former is known to have passed an important law for Caesar in that year, while Peducaeus and Allienus were respectively a few years later made governors of Sardinia and Sicily by Caesar (App. ii, 48). I cannot see my way to any hypothesis from these coincidences, though I have sometimes wondered whether this agrarian law may not belong to a later period of Caesar's life than 59.

page 106 note 1 Bell. Civ. i, 15.

page 106 note 2 ad Fam. xiii, 11, 3.

page 106 note 3 Liv. xxxviii, 36.

page 107 note 1 Six Rom. Laws, pp. 164–165.

page 108 note 1 C.I.L. v, 2864.

page 108 note 2 The use of “lex municipalis” in the jurists for “the charter of each particular town’ stands on a different footing, and presents no analogy with the present case.

page 109 note 1 I cannot leave unnoticed Legras' insistence on the inconsistency between line 150 of the Table, where a mere majority, ‘major pars decurionum” is required, and Ulpian's statement (Dig. 50, 9, 3), “lege autem municipali cavetur ut ordo non aliter habeatur quam duabus partibus adhibitis.” (1) The election of the ‘legati’ to carry the census papers to Rome was so trivial a matter that the provision accepting the election of a bare majority might well be an exception to a more general clause in another part of the law, requiring a quorum either for all or for the most important business. (2) The compiler of this part of the Digest has so isolated this excerpt from Ulpian's ‘de appellationibus,’ as perhaps to give a false impression of its purport. In the case of an ‘appellatio’ from a municipality the town would be represented by an actor or syndicus elected by the decuriones. There may have been a praetorian edict, afterwards incorporated in the ‘leges datae,’ to the effect that in such cases two-thirds of the decuriones were required, and to this Ulpian may be alluding. This is rendered the more probable, because both Ulpian and Paulus in their commentary on the edict, and in special reference to the election of actores, specify precisely this quorum as necessary. (Dig. iii, 4–34). There were no ‘actores civitatis’ in the technical sense at first, but it deserves notice that when officials with somewhat analogous duties have to be elected at Malaca, it is again this quorum of decuriones which is required (lex Mal. c. 63). For most of these points I am indebted to Legras himself, who seems unconscious that they dispose of one of his own arguments against identifying lines 83–158 of the Table with part of a general municipal law.

page 110 note 1 An example of how far this was the case is found in the decision of Ulpian that an edict of Hadrian prohibiting burial within a town would override a ‘lex data’ allowing it.